Austin City Limits: Tom Waits 1979
Recorded during a period that found Waits refining his gutter-poetry songwriting while delving deeper into pre-rock blues and jazz influences, the episode finds Waits digging into the track lists of his three late-’70s LPs: Small Change, Foreign Affairs, and Blue Valentine. He turns in an especially effective rendition of Foreign Affairs’ “Burma Shave,” mashing up the noir-ish talking blues number with George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” leaning like a drunken scarecrow on the filling-station set dressing. Waits’ innovative staged dark night of the soul is complemented by other vintage picks from the ACL vaults.
Updated 08/24/2011
The Spalding Gray/Laurie Anderson Age: The creative flourish of New York in the 1980s
